It is no secret that Microsoft is doing whatever it can to eat away at Google's immense market share of the search market, with Bing being its most ambitious effort yet. Well, it seems the battle just got a whole lot dirtier, as The Financial Times has uncovered news that Microsoft has approached several news content providers, offering them money if they "de-index" their sites from Google.

While I have no real objection to google somehow loosing marketshare by competition, I do have a problem with the internet becoming less open. I do not want to see sections of the internet becoming walled off behind bing or google or whoever pays the most money. Heck stuff like this is what people made people scared of a search monopoly in the first place, they just never though it wouldn't come from the guy in first. If this deal of goes through I won't be using Bing. Though as aside if this actually happened I don't think I would notice without being told, I don't search for news corp websites in the search engine, I search for current stories and go to the ones that are near the top of the list, whoever they may be, if I wanted a specific site I would have gone to that site first and not bothered with the search engine.

Also I'm wondering how much Microsoft is gonna have to pay these guys, their business model is dying because the ad market has changed, not because of google search or google news (google ad sense on the other hand...) the money Mircosoft hands out is either going to be a drop in the bucket compared to their losses from dropping ad revenue and subscribers, or Microsoft will end up bankrolling the entire news industry, not just for America but for Europe as well since they have been just as mad at 'google' for 'killing' their business.. That could create its own problems with Microsoft having an unreasonable amount of control over the news industry. I am way more worried about all of this than google's search monopoly, they just sell ads and have no financial interest in who tops the search results, with Bing there will be a lot of money changing hands.